Military planners forced to change strategy

WASHINGTON – Facing an Iraqi foe fighting harder than expected, the U.S. military has been forced to adapt its plans and direct thousands more troops to protect vulnerable supply lines and wipe out guerrilla fighters. The fight to topple Saddam Hussein is shaping up as America’s most intense ground war in decades.

The war so far suggests a difficult, dirty and time-consuming “boots on the ground” conflict. An additional 100,000 American soldiers are headed to join in.

“No plan, no matter how perfect, survives first contact with the enemy,” Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday as the Pentagon faced questions about whether the Iraqis’ will to fight was a surprise.

The Pentagon’s preference – that the massive show of U.S. force at the start of the air and ground campaign would prompt Saddam’s forces to crumple – did not occur, acknowledged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Now, U.S. troops are crossing big bridges under the threat of enemy fire, something rarely done since the Korean War. They are defending long, strung-out supply lines from attack and dropping in a thousand paratroopers at a time – on a scale not seen since Vietnam.

This week, the Army lost the first two M1 Abrams tanks ever destroyed by direct enemy fire. U.S. generals are even contemplating the possibility of laying siege to a city of 5 million, Baghdad.

Recommended Stories For You

None of that is new in the history of warfare. But little of it has been seen by Americans for a long time.

“Unlike the first Gulf War, we’re trying to take over this country,” said Jay Farrar, a former top Defense Department official now a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“It won’t require a complete, total occupation of every square mile,” Farrar said. “But it’s going to be ugly in the views of most Americans, because they simply didn’t expect this.”

Pentagon officials did expect Iraqi resistance, they have made clear. If the initial thrusts didn’t lead to surrender, Rumsfeld said Friday, plans were ready to move to significant ground operations.

But several complications forced the U.S. to adapt:

– Some military officials say they assumed Iraqi resistance would be concentrated around Baghdad. Instead, Saddam’s paramilitary special Republican Guard and internal security services like the Fedayeen also chose to fight in southern cities like Basra.

That tenacity, although probably defeatable in the end, forced American officials to redirect more troops to protect the lines of trucks carrying military supplies – fuel, food, artillery shells, rockets – on the long highways north from Kuwait.

– The U.S. decision to begin attacking Iraq before all U.S. troops were in place became a problem once Turkey turned down the U.S. request to move troops to northern Iraq through its territory.

That meant there was no initial northern front and Iraq’s guerrilla fighters could concentrate on the south, increasing their effectiveness.

Late Wednesday, the U.S. began the first significant steps to open the delayed northern front, sending more than 1,000 paratroopers to grab an air base that will allow the U.S. to begin flying in stockpiles of heavy weapons.

The force originally scheduled to go to northern Iraq, the Army’s 4th Infantry, is just now preparing to leave bases in the United States to fly to Kuwait to hook up with its equipment, now sailing that way.

Altogether, about 90,000 U.S. troops are inside Iraq, according to the Pentagon, an increase of about 14,000 in just two days. More than 250,000 U.S. troops are in the region overall, including thousands aboard Navy ships.

An additional 100,000 to 120,000 ground troops are expected to begin arriving in Kuwait in coming days, including the 4th Infantry and the Army’s 1st Armored and 1st Cavalry divisions.

It remains unclear if military leaders will wait for all those reinforcements before beginning a significant push against Baghdad, or press ahead after just some arrive. Rumsfeld hinted Thursday that U.S. hopes for an Iraqi uprising inside Baghdad could still influence that.

“There was all this discussion before the war of air power,” said Jeff White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official now a defense analyst in Washington.

“But this is going to be in a fundamental way a ground war, a matter of seizing and occupying territory in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Sally Buzbee has covered national security and foreign policy issues for the Associated Press.